AI Makes You Dumb

AI Makes You Dumb

August 14, 2026

If you don’t use it, you lose it. This applies to almost everything, especially your physical fitness and your muscles. We all know it: if you stop cycling for a month and then get back on your bike, you notice it immediately. But the same applies to our brains. We are becoming increasingly aware of this.

Anthony sent me a reel listing ten skills that are on the verge of disappearing:

Remembering phone numbers; they are all stored in our phones.

Mental arithmetic; we immediately reach for the calculator.

Finding our way; we blindly rely on GPS.

Reading an analog clock; especially younger people are increasingly struggling with this.

Writing by hand; almost everything is typed.

Keeping a physical calendar and address book; everything is digital and stored in the cloud.

Finding your way around a library; the search bar has replaced traditional catalog systems.

Making photo albums; our photos remain on our phones or in the cloud.

Reading a printed newspaper; news comes to us through websites and social media.

Communicating face-to-face; we are getting less practice having uninterrupted, in-depth conversations.

And now I received a study that goes one step further. People who still write for themselves, old school, show a great deal of brain activity while writing. People who use AI to produce texts, on the other hand, reportedly show significantly less brain activity.

That got me thinking. Technology is not only taking over physical and practical skills from us, but increasingly cognitive skills as well. We need to remember less, calculate less, search less, formulate less, and ultimately perhaps even think less.

So there is growing evidence that artificial intelligence may stifle our own intelligence, regardless of how exactly we define intelligence.

That means we have a real problem. Not because AI is inherently bad, but because what we no longer use eventually deteriorates.

If you don’t use it, you lose it.

But I fear that we will dismiss these insights as well.

Miguel Goede